Click to Print  |  Standard View

Part of the current federal stimulus package is aimed at spurring medical research, and to that end, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is getting ready to issue at least $200 million for studies on a wide range of topics, including those specifically related to respiratory care.

The program also includes additional funds to pay for projects using comparative effectiveness research, which is defined as “a rigorous evaluation of the impact of different options that are available for treating a given medical condition for a particular set of patients. Such a study may compare similar treatments, such as competing drugs, or it may analyze very different approaches, such as surgery and drug therapy.”

The NIH has identified topic areas for the Challenge Grant studies. Topics of specific interest to respiratory care include:

• Treatment of mild persistent asthma in children
• Prevention of chronic diseases in disparity populations
• Treatment of obstructive sleep apnea
• Increasing compliance with medication protocol given to discharged emergency department patients
• Personalized algorithms for treatment of COPD
• Cost-effective strategies to achieve smoking cessation in hospitalized patients with cardiovascular disease and COPD
• Characterize the role and effects of the respiratory and/or intestinal microbiota on the presence and clinical phenotype of lung disease
• Develop nanotools for pulmonary medicine
• Solid oral dosage forms for pediatric medications
• Develop innovative technologies and measurements to assess and provide real-time feedback on behavioral and environmental exposures for disease onset and progression for heart, lung, and blood diseases
• Develop integrative strategies to elucidate the mechanisms of lung diseases
• Assess the role of leukocyte interaction with platelets, erythrocytes, and endothelium in the pathogenesis of heart, lung, and blood diseases
• Management of sarcoidosis
• Treatment of pulmonary hypertension and right heart failure
• Develop new imaging methodologies to track cells and measure accurately the chemical activities of enzymes and metabolites in intact cells, tissues, and organisms to improve basic understanding of cellular interactions, biological pathways, and their regulation
• Develop transgenic animal models that are informative for understanding chronic inflammation in humans
• Develop new technologies to advance heart, lung, and blood research
• Generate reagents for studying lung cell biology and disease progression
• Develop devices and instruments for assessing and supporting assessment of pulmonary function in an ICU
• Identifying causal genetic variants associated with heart, lung, and blood diseases
• Identify causal genetic variants associated with heart, lung, and blood diseases by application of targeted DNA capture and massively parallel sequencing technologies followed by selective genotyping of DNA samples from large well-phenotyped populations
• Develop methods to integrate and analyze data from two or more different ‘omics approaches (e.g., GWAS, sequencing, epigenetics, metabolomics, transcriptomics) to capitalize on existing heart, lung, and blood data sets
• Perform genome-wide association and exon sequencing studies for rare lung diseases
• Develop tools to detect early indicators of health disparities, and to test collaborative interventions to reduce differential health care or outcomes for heart, lung, and blood diseases
• Develop data sharing and analytic approaches to obtain from large-scale observational data, especially those derived from electronic health records, reliable estimates of comparative treatment effects and outcomes of cardiovascular, lung, and blood diseases
• Develop cell-based therapies for cardiovascular, lung, and blood diseases
• Developing molecular signatures for heart, vascular, lung, and blood diseases by profiling reprogrammed induced pluripotent stem cells derived from affected individuals of defined genotype
• Generating human neurons with iPS to screen and develop bioactive agents for the treatment of nicotine addiction
• Develop new therapeutic strategies for heart, lung, and blood diseases based on microRNA technology
• Employ metabolomic approaches to improve diagnose, stage, and select therapies for lung diseases
• Material development for environmental health curriculum
• Capturing social network information for groups at high risk for negative health behaviors
• Research to inform FDA regulation of tobacco products
• Test default options to promote healthier behaviors

Applications for the Challenge Grants are being accepted now through April 27. Visit the NIH Challenge Grants web page to learn more and apply.